A lot of newscasters and social media content creators over the past day have been showcasing the horrific imagery of the flooding at the Nepal-China border crossing.
And the videos are almost unbelievable to watch. But what makes them even more horrific is remembering that this isn’t a movie set. Those aren’t Legos or props bouncing around in the water. Those are real people who, in the midst of their lives, were suddenly caught in a catastrophic rush of water — apparently triggered by some kind of seismic or geological event, whether an earthquake, landslide, or something else.
When you actually stop and consider what you’re watching, the videos are heartbreaking.
But that’s the problem. We don’t really stop anymore.
We watch it. We scroll. We watch it again from another angle. Someone reposts it. Someone adds music or commentary. It appears on another feed, and then another. And because we’ve become so desensitized to violence, disaster and heartbreak, something absolutely horrifying somehow becomes just another piece of content in the daily news cycle.
But these aren’t just dramatic images.
These are images of people losing their lives in one of the most terrifying ways imaginable. People who had families. People who woke up that morning expecting there to be a tomorrow. And now the final moments of some of their lives are being replayed endlessly for millions of strangers.
And people just keep reposting it.
It’s incredibly morbid when you really stop and think about it.
What have we become?
